'Ndrangheta mafia taking root in northern Italy

One of Italy's most powerful
mafia syndicates is expanding beyond its southern heartland and taking root in
the wealthy north of the country, the Organized Crime Observatory warned on
Thursday.

Families from the 'Ndrangheta
organization are infiltrating small towns in northern Italy, "influencing
local government and monopolizing sectors key to the mafia economy," the
country's organized crime watchdog said.

The mafia has traditionally
flourished in poor southern Italy, but networks of mobsters from the Calabria
region are increasingly taking advantage of a reduced police presence in small
northern towns and the fact that fewer votes are needed to get elected to town
councils.

"The latest police probes
have revealed a political and institutional system which is increasingly
vulnerable to mafia infiltration, as well as business communities which often
collude, and abide by the code of silence," the Observatory said in a
report titled "Mafia in the North".

The 'Ndrangheta organization
plays a leading role in the global cocaine trade and its Calabria bastion is a
major transit point for drug shipments from Latin America to the rest of
Europe.

The revelation came just days
after Prime Minister Matteo Renzi vowed to make inroads into widespread
corruption in northern Italy by boosting the powers wielded by top magistrate
Raffaele Cantone, famed for investigations into organized crime groups.

A series of corruption scandals
has also thrown the spotlight onto detention conditions in Italy's prisons and
the reach of mobster bosses from behind bars - an issue addressed on Thursday
by a Senate meeting on the rights of mafia inmates.

Bosses captured in Italy are
imprisoned in particularly severe conditions under a law known as "41
bis", which greatly restricts their contact with other inmates and
non-prisoners in an attempt to stop them continuing to orchestrate crime from
the inside.

Mafia on the inside

The law was adopted in 1975 as
an emergency measure to deal with prison unrest during the so-called
"years of lead" in which the mafia, the ultra-leftwing Red Brigades
and neo-fascist groups were implicated in a surge of political violence.

"The law aims to prevent
prison from becoming an extension of territory, with the organization
controlling it as it controlled its territory" on the outside, anti-mafia
prosecutor Franco Roberti told the Senate.

He gave as an example the
failure to limit the rights of Raffaele Cutolo, nicknamed "the
professor", which allowed him to found a new mafia group from behind bars
in the 1970s while serving multiple life sentences for murder.

But Mauro Palma, chair of the
European Council on prisons, warned the Senate that the harsh treatment of
gangsters could see Italy condemned by the European Court of Human Rights.

A report by the European
Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) in 2012 had outlined a series of
concerns - such as limited time allowed out of solitary confinement and reduced
contact with relatives on the outside - which Palma said had remained
unchanged.

"We need to make sure the
inmates spend at least four hours out of their cells and not two," he
said, as well as allowing them to accumulate visiting hours -- currently
limited to one hour a month.

Inmates - including top
Sicilian bosses "Toto" Rina and Bernardo Provenzano - can only speak
to visitors via intercom from behind a thick glass wall - or swap their monthly
visit for one ten-minute telephone call.

According to Roberti, there are
currently 717 inmates being held under "41 bis", three of them for
"terrorism" - including the only woman, a member of the Red Brigades
- and the rest for mafia crimes.

The current system must be
revised "to prevent the Court of Human Rights receiving complaints about
unjustified detention conditions," Palma said.